Elvira

She also sang "Monster Rap" and "Haunted House" on the Elvira's Monster Hits album. In her later years she appeared in supporting roles in television before her death from pneumonia in Locust Valley, New York. Elvira has become a symbol of Halloween, and owns the trademark to her wig and costume. Still an outsider in Hollywood, Revere was not considered for the film version which was played by Wendy Hiller. One of the first successful horror hostesses, Vampira (Maila Nurmi), later sued Peterson over character rights issues. With her husband, the playwright and director Samuel Rosen, Revere moved to New York where the couple ran an acting school, and Revere returned to Broadway. She won a Tony Award in 1961 for her role in Lillian Hellman's Toys in the Attic. Shortly after her marriage to Mark Pierson (now her business manager) in 1981, she created the character Elvira after a successful audition to be a horror movie show host. She was the first such host to be nationally syndicated. For the rest of her life she maintained that the unsigned copy of a Communist Party registration card that was used as evidence of her party membership was a fake.

Back in the US, she joined the Los Angeles-based improvisational troupe The Groundlings. Called before the House Un-American Activities Committee, Revere pled the Fifth Amendment and her Hollywood career was ruined. In Italy, she was the lead singer in a rock band and a chance encounter with Federico Fellini led to a small part in Roma (1972). Her last role of note was as the mother of Montgomery Clift in A Place in the Sun (1951), before her career was destroyed by the McCarthy witchhunts. She became a showgirl at The Dunes in Las Vegas at age 17. She received Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress nominations for three motherly roles during the 1940s - as the mother of Jennifer Jones in The Song of Bernadette (1943), Elizabeth Taylor in National Velvet (1944) for which she won the award, and Gregory Peck in Gentleman's Agreement (1947). Born in Manhattan, Kansas, Peterson grew up in Colorado. She made her film debut in the 1934 film version of the latter, and she quickly established herself as a character actress, specialising in worldly wise but frequently sharp tongued supporting roles.

She gained fame wearing dark, gothic, and cleavage-enhancing clothing as host of Elvira's Movie Macabre, a weekly horror movie presentation. She made her Broadway acting debut in 1931 in The Great Barrington and followed this success with a role in Double Door. Elvira, Mistress of the Dark is the screen persona of Cassandra Peterson (born September 17, 1949). Born in New York, New York Revere was a direct descendant of American Revolution figure Paul Revere. Anne Revere (June 25, 1903 – December 18, 1990) was an American film actress.